


Remind Me

by chameleontattoos



Series: Andromedatober 2020 [1]
Category: Andromeda Six (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Past Vexx/Traveler, also vague description of a nightmare in which there was violence, spoilers for chapter 3, vague description of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27019270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chameleontattoos/pseuds/chameleontattoos
Summary: One of the things about flying through the vacuum of space in a cruiser of relatively unimpressive proportions is that it’s hard not to feel very,verysmall.(Andromedatober day 1: Alone)
Relationships: Vexx Serif/Traveler
Series: Andromedatober 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1977943
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	Remind Me

One of the things about flying through the vacuum of space in a cruiser of relatively unimpressive proportions is that it’s hard not to feel very, _very_ small.

All of those stars that Reba can see out there, distantly bright on the other side of her cabin window—they’re no bigger than pinpricks from so far away, tiny motes of light hung on an endless swathe of black velvet.

When she was a child—and before her tutors set her straight—Reba had been _so sure_ that the glittering expanse of the Silta Vie night sky was nothing more than a short spacecraft flight away. If they appeared to people on the planet’s surface as spots of light the size of small insects, she reasoned, then up close they must each be as big as her father’s palace.

(At the age of six, _as big as the palace_ was still very large indeed. She’d once managed to convince one of her nursemaids to tell her how far it was from the castle to the edge of Goldis, and the knowledge that a person could see the palace walls from even outside the city had absolutely blown her tiny little mind.)

She had often wondered why she could never see ships take off and land from them—not even the biggest ships in Father’s fleet!

The reason, she would later learn, was that it would take _years_ to reach one of those stars without using FTL travel.

 _Years_. There might as well be complete emptiness beyond the walls of the ship.

Reba rests her chin on the windowsill. The chill of the metal sinks into her jaw, just on the near side of being uncomfortable.

She used to wonder what it might be like to travel to one of those faraway giants. What kinds of planets did they hold in their gravity wells? What life did they support? _Did_ they support life?

Of course, that was before the K’merii turned life in _her_ system upside down, in the course of which they incited a coup in her home city and murdered her entire family. Now she has slightly more pressing concerns, such as: At what point will her brain run out of nightmare juice and just let her _sleep_?

She was already having those confusing, foggy dreams while her unconscious mind drip-fed her memories back to her, and they were disruptive enough. But then Teranium happened— _Vexx­_ happened—and the fog has cleared enough to make way for a truly delightful revolving door of sleepytime terrors.

It’s _great_.

The details of this most recent horror-show are already mostly faded, but she doesn’t need to pry her mind’s eye back open to remember how terrifying it was. She recalls more than she’d like to as it is.

A wall—no, a room. Dried blood and old bones.

“Ugh.”

Reba thunks her head against the window once before straightening and resettling so that her knees and ankles aren’t being crushed into oblivion.

When she was pressed up against the pane, all she could see was the stars; now, the renewed distance from the glass brings her reflection into view. Her semi-transparent doppelgänger blinks tiredly back at her.

 _Gods_ , she looks as terrible as she feels.

But at least she’s awake. The relentless mental onslaught of fiction-mixed-with-fact can’t touch her when her eyes are open. She’ll quite happily take ‘being very aware of the empty, uncaring void’ over _that_ alternative, thank you.

Reba scrubs a hand over her face and shoves it into her tangled hair. A self-deprecating grimace tugs at her lips. _If Vexx could see me now._

“I’m sure he’d be very proud of himself,” she snorts. “Bastard.”

Truthfully, her feelings as they concern Vexx are… complicated. With no way to check for herself without being exposed, she has no idea if any of the other palace servants survived the K’Merii takeover. Vexx might well be the only person left who knew her _before_. He took care of her. He helped her feel less isolated. He was her best friend in a situation where people of her station _having_ friends was discouraged. He was _more_ than her best friend. He was her first kiss, her first—she _loved_ him.

She _loves_ him. Present tense. And that’s where it gets complicated, because she wouldn’t even _remember_ that fact if he hadn’t materialised on Teranium and proceeded to dash her newborn hope that someone who cared that she even _existed_ was still out there.

Well, technically, that hope _was_ fulfilled in a roundabout, horrible opposite-land kind of way. By now, Vexx has almost definitely told his boss that one of the Peg’asi princesses did survive, and therefore they actually _haven’t_ wiped Fenris’ line off the face of the galaxy.

_Sorry, Zovack! One of us did an oopsie and miscounted the royal brats. One got away, tee-hee!_

As much as she wants to hate him, though… she can’t. It definitely hurts—holy _everything_ , does it hurt—but she can’t hate Vexx while she’s still seeing his bleached, abandoned bones in all of her bad dreams.

“…Bastard,” she says again, although this time she struggles to get the word out under the weight of how much she wants to say _I miss you_ instead.

She _can’t_ say that. He _left_ her. She’s _furious_.

A tear leaks out of the corner of her starlit reflection’s eye. A second tear follows.

She lets them fall.

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, I know it's the 15th, but time is a construct. At any rate, I do have plans to fill all the prompts!! Not all of them will be angst!! Probably!!


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